Ikaruga and 36 Others Make it Through Greenlight

Although Greenlight has its (often justified) detractors, the pace at which new titles are being accepted onto Valve's Steam platform seems to have been accelerating somewhat recently.

The latest batch of games and other software to successfully make it through the process has been announced -- this time around, there's 35 games and two non-game packages.

Arguably the most high-profile game to make it through the Greenlight process is Treasure's polarity shooter Ikaruga, a title which some argued was already well-established enough to mean it shouldn't really have had to suffer the indignity of begging for votes in the first place. Fortunately, like previous "why is this going through Greenlight?" title Deadly Premonition, Ikaruga has sped through the process with great haste, with barely two weeks passing between it appearing and being given a resounding "thumbs up" by the community as a whole.

Better late than never: soon you'll be playing Ikaruga on your PC.

Ikaruga's not the only interesting title in the new batch, though. Also worthy of note is Neverending Nightmares, the Kickstarter-funded, heavily stylized psychological horror game based on the real-life experiences of one of its developers struggling with obsessive-compulsive disorder and depression. The game deliberately eschews survival horror traditions such as limited save points, ammo hoarding and puzzle solving in favor of emphasizing exploration and vulnerability. The game also plays down the punishment for failure, with "dying" resulting either in waking up in the same nightmare or proceeding down a different narrative path than if you had succeeded at whatever the challenge was.

There's a few ports from mobile platforms that are worthy of note, too. Ravensword: Shadowlands was an impressive open-world RPG on iOS and Android, though on PC it has the likes of Skyrim to contend with. For fans of tabletop games, Fantasy Flight Games' official adaptation of its Cthulhu-themed dice game Elder Sign: Omens is a good time, particularly as the Steam version will include all of the mobile version's expansions when it's released.

For those keeping an eye on Steam's non-game apps, this latest Greenlight batch also includes Axis Game Factory Pro, a powerful level and terrain editor designed for use with Unity4; and Aartform Curvy 3D, a sketch-based sculpting program for Windows designed to allow 2D artists or first-time 3D artists to create 3D models with just a few strokes of the virtual pen.

As ever, Valve has organized the latest Greenlight batch into a handy collection for you to review. Anything there catch your attention besides the things we've already mentioned?